Challenges caused by climate change increase concern for achieving global sustainability. Although citizen awareness is increasing, ensuring sustainability in key sectors like construction is necessary. Achieving sustainability requires essential actions that, however, could have a negative impact on economic performance. Studies on renewable energy installations tend to prioritize performance or sustainability, rather than facing the strategic challenge to find the balance between both. The present work fits this framework through managing renewable energy operations in a construction materials factory of Grupo Puma, located in Spain. The objective of the proposed methodology is to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for the FV installation and to simulate energy flows using a validated model within a digital simulation environment. This study proposes a trinomial of KPIs—self-consumption, solar utilization, and avoided CO2 emissions—as more stable indicators than conventional metrics. The Pareto front analysis shows that self-consumption can be increased by up to 20% with only an approximate 10% reduction in solar utilization. This finding offers a clear strategic recommendation: prioritizing higher self-consumption is a viable industrial strategy to enhance Grupo PUMA’s sustainability performance while maintaining acceptable economic efficiency.
Lopera-Rodríguez et al. (Tue,) studied this question.